The cries of voter suppression fall flat

By ROBERT DANOSA Free Exchange

Sunday

Jan 11, 2015 at 12:01 AM

How long does a person of goodwill keep repeating a morally impugning line of attack once it has been disproven?

How long does a person of goodwill keep repeating a morally impugning line of attack once it has been disproven?I don’t mean the regrettable characters who appear on every part of the political spectrum who only know how to feed their followers with bile, facts be damned. The Moral Monday left in North Carolina has plenty of those in its leadership, with the Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP, as the poster child for demagoguery.I am thinking of the many people on the left, in Henderson County and others parts of North Carolina, who have different views on the issues than me but who I know think of themselves as people who would not continue a highly charged attack once it has been 100 percent proven false.To that end, I have been waiting on the final State Board of Elections data on voter turnout from the November general election.The New York Times ran a story on Dec. 15 after crunching that data and comparing 2014 turnout to the previous midterm election in 2010 as opposed to comparing it to the 2012 presidential year, which would not be a relevant comparison. The headline was “Why Even a Good Midterm Turnout for Democrats in North Carolina Fell Short.”A good midterm turnout? How is that possible with all of the supposed impediments the Republicans have put in place since 2010 to suppress voter turnout, especially among youths and blacks?The piece went on to report that Sen. Kay Hagan’s 2014 campaign “received a far stronger turnout than Democrats received in 2010. They were younger, less Republican and more diverse than the nearly 2 million voters who participated in 2010.”Younger and more diverse? Yes, it appears that supposed GOP efforts to suppress youth and minority turnout failed.On young voters, the numbers show that “the turnout among young voters was strong when compared with previous midterm elections.”On black voters, the numbers show that “the non-Hispanic white share of the electorate dropped from 76.6 percent in 2010 to 74.1 percent this year” and that the share of the vote from black voters grew from 20.1 percent in 2010 to 21.4 percent in 2014.

Readers may remember that I pointed out these same patterns after the May primary. By then, the new laws regarding eliminating same-day registration and cutting the number of early voting days, but keeping the total number of voting hours the same by increasing them both before and after regular work hours, had already been implemented.I pointed out then that the left’s cries of minority voter suppression and creating a situation for unworkable voter lines had been proven false. Black turnout was up in the primary, and there were no problems with lines.The response I heard was, well, just wait until the general election!Well, we have now had our first general election under these new laws, and the sky still hasn’t fallen even though Chicken Little, William Barber and the Moral Monday protesters never stopped yelling.It not only didn’t fall, but it in fact remained quite routine and saw increases, not decreases, in the supposedly suppressed groups.I have been watching for retractions from Moral Monday leaders or the editorial boards of The New York Times, MSNBC, the Raleigh News & Observer or the Asheville Citizen-Times, but they haven’t come yet.I asked for the opinion of a few of the Henderson County Democratic Party volunteers who I shared the sidewalk with outside of the county Board of Elections during early voting, passing out our respective materials. I told them several days into early voting that reports from around the state were showing no long lines and no signs of lower turnout in heavily minority counties and cities.Their responses were insightful. Several of them said they would wait to see if I was correct but that, if so, it was only because they had worked so hard to educate minority voters as to the new laws.Wow. Patronization with pride is all I could think. These are good, decent people. I have no doubt as to the goodwill, but this mindset — that the black voters of North Carolina would only figure out how to take advantage of a new schedule with longer daily voting hours due to someone else’s efforts — floored me.But the most consistent reply I heard as to why the Chicken Little predictions may have fallen flat so far but are still yet to come was — you guessed it — voter ID.

Yes, the last part of the election reform package that will come into place in the 2016 election will be the photo ID section. And you have a great number of people who seem to be holding out a strange sort of hope that it will finally result in some voter suppression — even though, as I have written here before, that has been proven false in the states near us.When that last bit of data is in, I just know that William Barber will want to preserve Moral Monday’s moral authority by admitting that years of charging racism and race-based voter suppression was all hot air.

Robert Danos is a Hendersonville resident and former spokesman for the 11th District NCGOP. Reach him at robertdanos@outlook.com.

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